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Amazon tries its hand at influencer affiliate marketing

Can influencers and affiliate marketing be a match made in heaven? Online retail’s 800-pound gorilla is apparently interested in finding out.

Last week, it was revealed that Amazon has launched a beta of an invite-only Amazon Influencer Program “exclusively designed for social media influencers with large followings and a high frequency of posts with shoppable content.”

According to TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez, the program functions like the company’s affiliate program in that participants are paid a commission for product sales that they drive. It is not known if the commission structure differs from Amazon’s affiliate program.

Unlike Amazon’s affiliate program, which requires that affiliates link to Amazon products from their own websites, Amazon is offering influencers vanity URLs, such as https://www.amazon.com/shop/whatsupmoms, on which lists of products they curate are displayed. As Perez notes, “Basically, it’s a more exclusive step up from Amazon Affiliate linking, and offers a better browsing experience.”

One of the early participants in the Amazon Influencer Program is WhatsUpMoms, which claims to be the top parenting network on YouTube. Its president and COO, Liane Mullin, says that the program was a natural fit. “We are constantly asked by our community for product recommendations and about the products used in our videos. Now that we have our own Amazon store it makes it much easier to have a curated collection all in one spot,” she told TechCrunch.

For that reason, it’s reportedly not uncommon for brands to pay the most prominent of influencers – those with millions of subscribers on popular social platforms like Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat – well into the five figures, and in some cases even six figures, for each promotional post.

Given the large sums being paid in the upper echelons of the market, brands tapping influencers to promote their wares will increasingly seek to justify the spend by tracking ROI and ensuring that their deals make financial sense. Performance marketing payment structures, which align compensation directly to customer acquisition or sales, could help them do just that in a very straightforward manner.

But will influencers embrace performance marketing?

For those earning thousands of dollars or more for sponsored posts, the prospect of giving up a guaranteed payment for a percentage of sales generated or a set fee for each customer acquisition might not be all that appealing. While some arrangements could theoretically offer significant upside, the truly influential influencers aren’t likely to see the benefits of taking on increased risk unless the market dynamic changes completely and they are forced to.

Instead, so long as their sway is growing and bringing with it negotiating leverage, expect to see more top influencers focus on long-term partnerships in which they might even work with brands to co-create product lines that they have a real ownership stake in. And expect to see the most ambitious influencers try to follow in the footsteps of social media stars like Michelle Phan, who has built her own business empire on the back of her YouTube popularity.

Of course, none of this means that the Amazon Influencer Program is destined to fail. But absent a bigger hook than an Amazon page on which influencers can curate lists of products that are sold on Amazon, it seems unlikely that the influencers with “large followings” Amazon is courting would have good reason to give their Amazon Influencer Program links top billing.

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